Nov 7, 2012

Internet has become a part of our day-to-day life. Even if we want to leave without it, we end up using it in some way or other. Internet was introduced to make your work life easier, not act as a distraction in your workflow. Nowadays people who work in offices and especially in homes end up wasting most of their time on social networks and some even on porn sites. Some parents are even afraid that their children are visiting porn sites behind their back and wasting their time, when they should be doing something like studying or working on their assignments. Most of these internet user ends up wasting a lot of bucks on some software which let them block websites.

I wouldn’t say that buying some software that gives you the ability to control and monitor which websites are being watched and which should be blocked is a good thing. But as a matter of fact you can actually block websites without any need for software. I think most of the Assassin Creed’s DRM people remember how to fake the DRM server (right?).

Note: Before making any changes to your hosts file try making a backup of it, in case if you mess things up.

How to block websites using Windows hosts file

In order to make changes to hosts file in Windows 7 and Windows Vista, you have to add extra privileges to yourself (as a Windows user). To do that you have view the properties of the etc folder mentioned below.

Now go to the Security Tab. Now in security tab choose the user to which you want to add privileges. Now click on Edit.

A new window will open, choose all the permissions for that specific user and click Apply.

Now you can easily make changes to hosts file.

In order to block websites without the need for software, you need to follow these simple steps.

To view the contents of the hosts file try opening it with Notepad or any other text editor.

Just below the line containing 127.0.0.1 localhost, add the site which you want to block like: 127.0.0.1 facebook.com

Save and close the hosts file.

Reboot your computer to apply the changes that you’ve made to hosts file.

Now try opening www.facebook.com in your browser.

Closing Words: Blocking websites using hosts file may not be the simplest way, but it’s definitely the best and the most prominent way to block websites. If you’re using some kind of software you may had noticed that all the software which lets you block websites uses hosts file to block them.[via techyfuzz]